Black Baseball Goes Pro
HISTORY This Week
The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios
4.5 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 7 February 2022
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Feb 13, 1920. For over thirty years, Black baseball players have been locked out of the major leagues. So on this day in Kansas City, Rube Foster, a former pitcher and now a team owner, is trying to make his own league just for Black players. He has gathered owners of other Black baseball teams, who currently play each other in one-off matchups or face independent teams in random games around the country. But Foster wants them to get organized, and soon, the Negro National League would be born. But up to this point, how did Black baseball survive after segregation became the unofficial policy of the major leagues? And how did Black players, owners, and managers join together to create something that no baseball fan could ignore?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The History Channel, original podcast. |
| 0:05.5 | History this week, February 13, 1920. |
| 0:13.7 | I'm Sally Helm. |
| 0:16.7 | The Paseo YMCA is no stranger to meetings. |
| 0:21.6 | There are meetings of Midwestern missionaries, |
| 0:24.6 | of something called the Texas Club of the Board of Directors at a local hospital. |
| 0:28.9 | The YMCA is a key institution in Kansas City, especially if you're black. |
| 0:35.1 | It's a place where young black men without a place to stay can get a nice room for about $2 a week. |
| 0:39.9 | Eat in the cafeteria, play piano in the lobby. |
| 0:43.0 | It's a place where black kids can take swimming lessons at the indoor pool. |
| 0:46.8 | The only one in town that black swimmers are allowed to use. |
| 0:51.5 | And today, more than a dozen men have come to this brick building on Paseo Street |
| 0:56.3 | for a very important meeting. The topic of the meeting is not missionaries, Texas, or hospitals. |
| 1:03.2 | The men are here to talk baseball. |
| 1:08.1 | Baseball at this time is the most popular sport in America. |
| 1:12.8 | But black players have been shut out of the major leagues for over 30 years. |
| 1:18.3 | And so they have their own professional teams. |
| 1:20.4 | The Chicago American Giants, the Detroit Stars, |
| 1:23.7 | and the hometown Kansas City Monarchs. |
| 1:27.6 | Black baseball players have their own teams, but they don't have their own league. |
| 1:34.2 | And lately, a lot of people have been calling for exactly that. |
| 1:39.3 | One prominent black team owner wrote a big article about it this very month. |
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